Saban shrugged. “I think Camaban is frightened that it will not work, which is why he is touched by madness,” he said quietly. “And that madness will not end until he has dedicated his temple. And perhaps Slaol will come? I wish he would.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Derrewyn asked.
“Then I have built a great temple,” Saban said firmly, “and when the madness is over we shall come here and we shall dance and we shall pray and the gods will use the stones as they think best.”
“And that is all you’ve done?” Derrewyn asked sourly. “Built a temple?”
Saban remembered what Galeth had said so shortly before his death. “What did the folk of Cathallo believe they were doing when they dragged those great boulders from the hills?” he asked Derrewyn. “What miracle were those stones going to work?”
Derrewyn stared at him for a heartbeat, but had no answer. She turned to Kilda. “Tomorrow,” she said, “you will tell the slaves that they are to be killed on midwinter’s eve. Tell them that in my name. And tell them that tomorrow night there will be a path of light to take them to safety. And you, Saban” – she turned and pointed at him with a bony finger – “tomorrow night you will sleep in Ratharryn and you will send Leir and my daughter back to the island. If Hanna stays in Ratharryn she will likely die, for she is still a slave of this temple even if she does rut with your son.”
Saban frowned. “Will I see my son again?”
“We shall come back,” Derrewyn confirmed. “We shall come back, and let me promise you something, and I promise it on my life. Your brother is right, Saban. On the day this temple is dedicated the dead will walk. You will see it. In three days’ time, when night falls on Ratharryn, the dead will walk.”
She pulled the hood over her head and, without a backward glance, walked away.
Chapter 20
Kilda would not go with Saban to the settlement. “I am a slave,” she told him. “If I stay in Ratharryn I shall be killed.”
“I wouldn’t permit it,” Saban said.
“The temple has made your brother mad,” Kilda responded, “and what you will not permit will give him delight. I shall stay here and walk Derrewyn’s path of light.”
Saban accepted her choice, though without any pleasure. “I am getting old,” he told her, “and my bones ache. I could not bear to lose a third woman.”
“You will not lose me,” Kilda promised. “When the madness is over we shall be together again.”
“When the madness is over,” Saban promised, “I shall marry you.”
With that promise he walked to Ratharryn. He was in a nervous mood, but so, he discovered, was the settlement, which was filled with an uneasy anticipation. Everyone was waiting for the temple’s dedication, though no one other than Camaban seemed certain what change would come in two days’ time, and even Camaban was vague. “Slaol will return to his proper place,” was all he would say, “and our hardships will vanish with the winter.”
Saban ate that night in Mereth’s hut where a dozen other folk had gathered. They brought food, they sang and they told old tales. It was the kind of evening Saban had enjoyed throughout his youth, yet this night the singing was half-hearted for all in the hut were thinking of the temple. “You can tell us what will happen,” a man demanded of Saban.
“I don’t know.”
“At least your slaves will be happy,” another man said.
“Happy?” Saban asked.
“They are to have a feast.”
“A feast of liquor,” Mereth interjected. “Every woman in Ratharryn has been told to brew three jars and tomorrow we are to carry it to the temple as a reward to your slaves. There’s no honey left in Ratharryn!”
Saban wished he could believe that Camaban really intended to offer the temple’s builders a feast, but he suspected the liquor was only intended to stupefy the slaves before the spearmen assaulted their encampment. He closed his eyes, thinking of Leir and Hanna who even now should be following the River Mai northward. He had embraced them both, then watched them walk away with nothing except Leir’s weapons. Saban had waited till they vanished in the winter trees and he had thought how simple life had been when his father had worshipped Mai, Arryn, Slaol and Lahanna, and when the gods had not made extravagant demands. Then the gold had come and with it Camaban’s ambitions to change the world.
“Are you sick?” Mereth asked, worried because Saban looked so pale and drawn.
“I’m tired,” Saban said, “just tired,” and he leaned back on the hut wall as the folk sang the song of Camaban’s victory over Rallin. He listened to the singing, then smiled when Mereth’s Outlander wife began a song from Sarmennyn. It was the tale of a fisherman who had caught a monster and fought it through the wind-stinging foam all the way to shore, and it reminded Saban of the years he had lived beside Sarmennyn’s river. Mereth’s wife sang in her own tongue and Ratharryn’s folk listened from politeness rather than interest, but Saban was remembering the happy days in Sarmennyn when Aurenna had not aspired to be a goddess, but had taken such delight in the making of the boats and the moving of the stones. He was thinking of Leir learning to swim when there was a sudden shout from the darkness outside and Saban twisted to the hut entrance to see spearmen running south toward a glow on the horizon. He stared and for a mad instant he thought the vast glow of fire meant that the stones themselves were on fire, then he shouted to Mereth that something strange was happening at the temple and scrambled into the night.
Derrewyn, it could be no one else, had fired the great piles of kindling and sledge timbers that had been waiting for the dedication. She had done more, for when Saban reached the sacred avenue he saw that the slave huts were also burning, indeed his own hut was in flames and the crackling fires lit the stones, making them beautiful in the darkness.
Then a warrior shouted that the slaves were gone.
Or most were. A few, too scared to run away, or not believing the rumor that Kilda had assiduously spread all day, were huddled by the sun stone, but the rest had fled southward along Derrewyn’s path of light. Saban climbed the crest south of the temple to see the path, which had been made by ramming torches into the turf, then lighting them so that their flames marked a path to safety. The torches burned low now as they snaked across the hills to disappear among the trees beyond the Death Place. The path of light was empty, for the slaves had long gone. By now, Saban thought, they would be deep in the forest and, even as he watched, the guttering torches began to flicker out.
Camaban raged amidst the astonishment. He shouted for water to extinguish the fires, but the river was too far away and the fires were too fierce. “Gundur!” he shouted, “Gundur!” and when the warrior came to him Camaban ordered that every spearman and every hunting dog in Ratharryn be sent on the fugitives’ trail. “And in the meantime take them to the temple and kill them.” He pointed his sword toward the handful of surviving slaves.
“Kill them?” Gundur asked.
“Kill them!” Camaban screamed, and set an example by hacking down a man who was trying to explain what had happened in the night. The man, a slave who had stayed at the temple expecting gratitude, looked astonished for a moment, then fell to his knees as Camaban chopped blindly down with his sword. Camaban was splashed with the man’s blood by the time he had finished, and then, his appetite unslaked, he looked around for another slave to kill and saw Saban instead. “Where were you?” Camaban demanded.
“In the settlement,” Saban said, staring at his blazing hut. What few possessions he had were in that hut. His weapons, clothes and pots. “There is no need to kill any slaves,” he protested.
“I decide the need!” Camaban screamed. He drew back the bloody sword. “What happened here?” he demanded. “What happened?”
Saban ignored the threatening sword. “You tell me,” he said coldly.
“I tell you?” Camaban kept the sword raised. “What would I know of this?”
“Nothing happens here, brother, unless you deci
de it. This is your temple, your dream, your doing.” Saban fought his rising anger. He looked at the flickering red flame-light where it touched the stones to fill the temple’s interior with a quivering tangle of locking shadows. “This is all your doing, brother,” he said bitterly, “and I have done nothing here except what you have told me to do.”
Camaban stared at him and Saban thought the sword must swing forward for there was a terrible madness in his brother’s fire-glossed eyes, but then, quite suddenly, Camaban began to cry. “There has to be blood!” he sobbed. “None of you understands! Even Haragg did not understand! There has to be blood.”
“The temple is soaked in blood,” Saban said. “Why does it need more?”
“There must be blood. If there’s no blood the god won’t come. He won’t come!” Camaban screamed this. Men watched him with appalled faces for he was now writhing as if his belly were gripped with pain. “I don’t want there to be death,” he cried, “but the gods want it. We must give them blood or they will give us nothing! Nothing! And none of you understands it!”
Saban pushed the sword down, then gripped his brother’s shoulders. “When you first dreamed of the temple,” he said quietly, “you did not see blood. There is no need for blood. The temple lives already.”
Camaban looked up at him, puzzlement on his striped face. “It does?”
“I have felt it,” Saban said. “It lives. And the gods will reward you if you let the slaves go.”
“They will?” Camaban asked in a frightened voice.
“They will,” Saban said, “I promise it.”
Camaban leaned against Saban and wept on his shoulder like a child. Saban comforted him until at last Camaban straightened. “All will be well?” he asked, cuffing at his tears.
“Everything will be well,” Saban said.
Camaban nodded, looked as if he would speak, but instead just walked away. Saban watched him go, let out a breath, then went to the temple and told Gundur the remaining slaves could live. “But run away,” he told the slaves grimly, “run now and run far!”
Gundur spat into the stones’ shadows. “He’s mad,” he said.
“He’s always been mad,” Saban said, “from the day he was born crooked he has been mad. And we have followed his madness.”
“But what happens when the temple is dedicated?” Gundur asked. “Where will his madness go then?”
“It is that thought which makes the madness worse,” Saban said. “But we have followed him this far so we can give him the next two nights.”
“If the dead don’t walk,” Gundur said grimly, “then the other tribes will turn on us like wolves.”
“So keep your spears sharp,” Saban advised.
The wind changed in the night to blow the smoke northward, and the wind brought a heavy rain that doused the fires and washed the last stone dust from the circle. When the skies cleared before dawn an owl was seen circling the temple and then flying toward the rising sun. There could be no better omen.
The temple was ready and the gods lingered close. The dream had become stone.
Aurenna came to Ratharryn in the morning, bringing Lallic and a dozen slaves with her. She went to Camaban’s hut and stayed there. It was a strangely warm day so that men and women walked about without cloaks and marveled at the new southern wind that had brought such weather. Slaol was already relenting of winter, they said, and the warmth reassured folk that the temple truly had power.
Many strangers were now at Ratharryn. None had been invited, but all came from curiosity. They had been arriving for days. Most were from neighboring peoples, from Drewenna and the tribes along the southern coast, but some came from the distant north and others had braved a sea journey to see the miracle of the stones. Many of the visitors were from tribes that had suffered cruelly from Ratharryn’s slave raids, but they all came in peace and brought their own food and so were allowed to build shelters among the berry-rich bushes of the nearby woods. On the day after the slaves fled Lewydd arrived with a dozen spearmen from Sarmennyn and Saban embraced his old friend and made room for him in Mereth’s hut.
Lewydd was chief of Sarmennyn now and had a gray beard and two new scars on his gray-tattooed cheeks. “When Kereval died,” he told Saban, “our neighbors thought we would be easily conquered. So I have fought battles for years.”
“And won them?”
“Enough of them,” Lewydd said laconically. Then he asked about Aurenna and Haragg, and about Leir and Lallic, and he shook his head when he heard all Saban’s news. “You should have come back to Sarmennyn,” he said.
“I always wished to.”
“But you stayed and built the temple?”
“It was my duty,” Saban said. “It is why the gods put me on the earth, and I am glad I did it. No one will remember Lengar’s battles, they might even forget Cathallo’s defeat, but they will always see my temple.”
Lewydd smiled. “You built well. I have seen nothing like it in any land.” He held his hands toward Saban’s fire. “So what will happen tomorrow?”
“You must ask Camaban. If he’ll talk to you.”
“He doesn’t talk to you?” Lewydd asked.
Saban shrugged. “He talks to no one except Aurenna.”
“Folk say that Erek will come to earth,” Lewydd suggested.
“Folk say many things,” Saban said. “They say that we shall become gods, that the dead will walk and that the winter will vanish, but I do not know what will happen.”
“We shall discover soon enough,” Lewydd said comfortingly.
Women prepared food all that day. Camaban had revealed no plans for the temple’s dedication, but midwinter had ever been a feast day and so the women cooked and beat and stirred so that the whole high embankment was filled with the smells of food. Camaban stayed in his hut and Saban was glad of that, for he feared his brother would miss Leir and demand to know where he had gone, but neither Camaban nor Aurenna questioned his absence.
Few slept well that night for there was too much anticipation. The woods were bright with the visitors’ fires and a new moon hung in the west, though at dawn the moon faded behind a fog as the people of Ratharryn dressed themselves in their finest clothes. They combed their hair and hung themselves with necklaces of bone, jet, amber and seashells. The weather was still strangely warm. The fog cleared and a sudden rain shower made the people dash for their huts, but when the rain ended there was a magnificent rainbow hanging in the west. One end of the rainbow swooped down to the temple and folk climbed the embankment to marvel at the good omen.
The clouds slowly drifted northward to leave a sky scraped bare and pale. By midday there were hundreds of folk from dozens of tribes up on the grassland about the temple and though there were scores of liquor pots no one became drunk. Some danced, some sang and the children played, though none ventured across the ditch and banks except for a dozen men who drove the cattle from among the stones then cleared the dung from inside the sacred circle. People stood beside the low outer bank and gazed at the stones, which looked splendid, clean, placid and filled with mystery. Folk complimented Saban, and he had to tell and retell the tales of the temple’s making: how some pillars were too short; how he had raised the lintels; and how much sweat had gone into every single stone.
The wind dropped and the day became oddly still which only sharpened the air of expectancy. The sun was sinking in the southern sky and still no procession came from Ratharryn, though folk said there were dancers and musicians gathering about the temple of Mai and Arryn. Saban took Lewydd through the entrance of the sun and told him how the stones had been sunk in the ground and raised into the sky. He stroked the flank of the mother stone, the only stone of Sarmennyn remaining in the ring, and then he picked up some chips of rock that still lay on the grass about Haragg’s bones. The rain had washed away the blood of the last sacrifice and the temple smelt sweet. Lewydd gazed up at the arches of the sun’s house and seemed lost for words. “It is …” he said, but could not fi
nish.
“It is beautiful,” Saban said. He knew every stone. He knew which ones had been difficult to erect, and which had gone easily into their holes. He knew where a slave had fallen from a platform and broken a leg, and where another had been crushed by a stone being turned for shaping, and he dared to hope that all life’s hardships would end this day as Slaol seared to his new home.
Then someone shouted that the priests were coming and Saban hurried Lewydd out of the temple, leaving it empty. They pushed through the crowd to see that the procession was at last coming from the settlement.
A dozen women dancers came first, sweeping leafless ash branches across the ground, and behind them came drummers and more dancers, and then came the priests who had their naked skins chalked and patterned and wore antlers or rams’ horns on their heads. Last of all came a great band of warriors, all with foxes’ brushes woven into their hair and hanging from their spears. Saban had never seen weapons carried to a temple’s dedication, but he supposed that nothing about this evening would be the same for the crooked child was setting the world straight.
One of the approaching priests carried the tribe’s skull pole and Saban saw the white bone start and stop as the priests placated the spirits. They prayed at the place where a man had fallen dead, wailed to the bear god where a child had been mauled to death, then stopped at the tombs to tell the ancestors what great thing was being done at Ratharryn this day. The sight of the skull reminded Saban of his false oath and he touched his groin and prayed to the gods to forgive him. Beyond the approaching priests the smoke from the settlement rose vertically into the sky, which was still clear of clouds, though the first faint shadow of night was dimming the north.
The procession came on again, dropping into the valley then climbing between the banks of the sacred path. The crowd had begun to dance to the approaching drum beats, shuffling left and right, advancing and retreating, beginning the steps that would not end until the drums ceased.
Camaban and Aurenna had not come with the priests, who now spread themselves into a ring about the temple’s ditch while the dancers swept their ash branches all about the chalk circle to drive away any malevolent spirits. The warriors, once the circle had been swept, made a protective ring about the chalk ditch.